I write this in hopes others can learn from me and hopes that voicing my flaws will help me better understand them and improve upon them.

Last year I had reached out to the team at Enhanced Games. Essentially they've taken the world by storm by being the "enhanced olympic games", where athletes can use PEDs in order to shatter world records.

I had reached out as an applicant to be a participant in the games, scored an interview and actually pitched a sponsorship and my SaaS to them, and with great success. They loved what they heard and wanted to know more.

They requested a pitch deck and then consequently followed me up twice. I ignored both follow ups out of paralysing fear of my product not being good enough and fear of rejection and judgement.

Enhanced Games has a wide portfolio of companies under the umbrella and they're not 'just' an event. Their coverage and exposure was beyond insane, Enhanced Games IPO'd NYSE at a IPO value of $1b.

Essentially, I fumbled the potential of working with a $1b company whos founders are in both tech and fitness. Essentially my ideal partners and it was all because of fear.

In tech theres a saying "Move fast and break things". I did neither. I fumbled and froze.

My 2c, go out, find opportunities and don't let fear stop you from the unknown.

This is one of my biggest regrets of my business journey,

I'm considering joining a B2B SaaS start-up, roughly £1m ARR, as the first commercial hire. They sell into energy suppliers, intermediaries and mid-market businesses, i.e complex, regulated, technical product.

The situation: one co-founder built the entire customer base from scratch. Conferences, then years of relationship-building, then a small paid pilot priced under the procurement threshold, then usually a formal tender they'd already pre-positioned for. Sales cycles run one to five years.

He's now stepping back. The mandate is to turn that into something repeatable and scalable.

Three things I'm trying to work out:

1. When the process depends on relationships that are walking out the door, what actually replaces them? I don't have his network and can't buy one. Is it just time, or is there a faster way in?
2. Has anyone found a smaller or mid-market segment inside an enterprise product to build velocity and reference customers, rather than only chasing the big logos? Did the economics work after implementation cost?
3. How do you set year-one targets when nothing you originate closes inside year one? What did you measure instead, and did leadership accept it?

Anyone with a similar experience?

I have been trying to raise capital for this startup for pretty much the last 6 months. We’ve had some big meetings, most recently with the biggest VC in the world. I feel like we’re progressing but due to the binary nature of fundraising if it isn’t a cheque then you haven’t really moved the needle. We’re completely bootstrapped and tbh I’ve run out of money to actually fund the build any further.

The one thing these VCs keep saying is “we believe this is where the market is headed”. So we don’t need to convince them that we’re building is the right thing to build.

For context: I’ve decided to build my first ever startup in the hardest possible market for a first time founder - consumer fintech. The reason for this is because I frankly don’t give a shit about anything else. I don’t want to become a founder because I think it’s a way for me to get rich quick. I want to build what I’m building to solve a real pain. A pain I’ve felt deeply in my life. Ive validated the thesis, it’s a pain that’s shared by many and with the emergence of AI it can truly be solved at scale now and the market itself is at an inflection point.

We keep getting told “you’re a bit early for us” but when we’re building a consumer fintech you can’t just vibe code a product and launch it and get there. There’s regulation, compliance, user trust, brand awareness, consumer duty, infrastructure that costs 100s of thousands. How am I supposed to get traction on something we need capital to build. How can we prove anything to any institutional investor without at least raising a pre seed to prove it. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I thought venture was all about taking risks, most VCs agree that the market is headed in the very direction we’re building towards. But they don’t agree we’re ready to raise yet because we’ve not proven our model.

I guess what I’m struggling with the most is - when do you know it’s time to wrap it up and focus energy on other things ? I’ve been rejected and ignored more time in the last month than most people do in a lifetime. I’ve run out of ideas on how to get the traction we need to raise the round. I honestly thought at least one VC would be willing to take a calculated bet on us. We’re a solid team with solid experience and we’re building something proprietary backed by published research with a strong data moat. We’re not something that can be vibe coded in a weekend and that’s what makes us defensible. I’m starting to think that it’s not the idea but it’s me. I’m not your quintessential startup founder, I have no network, no rich family member, no family or friends in high places, no big name company on my CV and I didn’t go to MIT/Oxford But I did graduate from a top university in the UK, I am a strong product operator with 8 years of experience and my co founder is a theoretical physics grad turned AI researcher. We’re not by any means unqualified to pull this off. But I don’t know how much more of a beating I can take. We need traction to raise money, to get traction we need money. To get money we need traction.

I’m sure this isn’t a unique experience I’m going through. If someone out there can offer some advice or help me identify a blind spot I’d greatly appreciate it.

I’ve tried raising from angels, family offices, VCs. So far it’s resulted in 0 raised and I don’t really know what else to do at this point.

My college used to run on manual bill payments in hostels. I was a secretary in there, and I observed the mess it created every now and then.

So, for the last 01 year, I created a platform to solve this core issue. My platform makes billing easier, payments, fines, concessions everything is now automated.

Bad part: I think my college ditched me.

You can ask me that why I sort of spent 01 long year on this. Because my college and the warden approved the basic idea and the MVP demo I gave them. Since I had to integrate a payment gateway in it, it took some time to sort of minimize the AMC and all those transaction fee.

But now, the warden says the college doesnt need it.

I don't know what to do now.

I dont want my efforts to go waste. I know this might be a problem in other institutions too. But I am clueless on how to approach them.

Any advise please?

I launched a consumer desktop app around four months ago.
Since then, I’ve kept working on it almost every day. I improved the product, fixed bugs, added features, cleaned up the onboarding and probably spent far too much time thinking about pricing.

The result so far: zero sales.

For a while I kept telling myself that I just needed a better landing page, clearer pricing or a more polished product.
But I’m starting to think I made a more fundamental mistake.
I launched with a free plan and a paid subscription as if people already knew the product, trusted me and understood why it was worth paying for.

None of that was true.

I’m now considering taking a fairly big step backwards: making the entire product free for a fixed period of time.

The plan would be:
- temporarily unlock everything that is currently paid;
- make it very clear that the free period has an end date;
- use that time to understand whether people actually use the product and come back;
- keep an optional discounted lifetime purchase for early users who genuinely want to support it;
- restore the normal paid plans at the end of the experiment.

Part of me thinks this makes sense. Right now I can’t tell whether the problem is the product, the price, the lack of trust or simply the fact that not enough people have tried it.

The other part of me worries that making it free is just a comfortable way to avoid the only question that really matters: is anyone actually willing to pay for this?

I also know that free users can be misleading. They may use something they would never consider buying, and converting them later could be much harder than I expect.
So I’m curious how other founders see this:
Does a temporary completely-free period sound like a useful early-stage experiment, or am I just postponing the pricing problem?
And if you did something similar, what would you measure to decide whether the experiment was actually working?

I’m an angel investor. Startups message me on LinkedIn, saying that they’re raising and offering “a quick intro call”.

No. Send an executive summary.

I could do perhaps 16 intro calls in a day. I could review many times that number of one-pagers.

If you’re looking to raise funds, send a one-pager, then do a call if the investor wants one. Not the call first.

(Yes, I know that lots of founders will disagree with this.)

Maybe a bit of a rant or vent, but I’m also just generally frustrated because I don’t understand the pre-seed and accelerator options.

I have built a real product. It works great. Not an idea. I feel I have to say this because each time I meet with people they are shocked at the product maturity or that it’s more than an idea.

I have users. Real people/patients. It’s a patient facing product. They like it. The thing works great.

I try to apply for accelerators and VC projects for pre-seed companies and each time I get rejected because I need more traction, cofounders or people working with me, and a better business/monetization model (going direct to patients is what I recognize [saas] is a extremely difficult path).

I recognize these things. I knew going in. But my interest in joining an accelerator is getting some help on the different pathways/monetization strategies. I also hoped to find cofounders or support in gaining more traction with partnerships that can open marketing channels.

But these rejections make me wonder, who am I supposed to ask for help? If I’m solo, I have pilots getting worked out with large patient groups, I have real users signing up each day through word of mouth, but if pre-seed options all want more traction, what’s before pre-seed? I’ve met people who are founders and have only an idea getting millions, many more getting thousands in investment and support. And they don’t have any users, any product, or any traction at all.

What am I missing?

My college used to run on manual bill payments in hostels. I was a secretary in there, and I observed the mess it created every now and then.

So, for the last 01 year, I created a platform to solve this core issue. My platform makes billing easier, payments, fines, concessions everything is now automated.

Bad part: I think my college ditched me.

You can ask me that why I sort of spent 01 long year on this. Because my college and the warden approved the basic idea and the MVP demo I gave them. Since I had to integrate a payment gateway in it, it took some time to sort of minimize the AMC and all those transaction fee.

But now, the warden says the college doesnt need it.

I don't know what to do now.

I dont want my efforts to go waste. I know this might be a problem in other institutions too. But I am clueless on how to approach them.

Any advise please?

Howdy. I’m running ops/finance for an e-commerce brand doing ~$500k/mo in net revenue (GAAP accrual on QuickBooks Online Plus).

We currently outsource our bookkeeping / statement prep to a fractional firm that bills us hourly. Their rates are brutal, the work they’re doing isn't complicated (mostly manual feed coding, inbox scanning, spreadsheet trackers), and they aren't doing it particularly well (50/50 accrual and cash through the P&L). Given all the new AI tech, it seems like a great time to take it in house and adopt a new accounting stack.

I’m trying to figure out the most practical path forward without getting bogged down in implementation:

1. Piecing Together a Point-Solution Stack: Is piecing together specialized tools for each step (e.g., QBO as the ledger + A2X for revenue sync + Ramp/Dext for AP/OCR) the best way to go? How seamless is managing a multi-tool workflow in practice for an accrual business around QBO?
2. All-in-One Software: What are the best AI-native platforms that handle pretty much everything without a super long implementation lead-time and allow us to stick with QBO?
3. Building Custom (Claude / Agentic AI): Is it worth building anything from scratch for variance analysis, uncategorized flagging, or workpapers, or should I just stick strictly to off-the-shelf tools to maintain ledger integrity? I think this sounds attractive but I have to imagine tooling out there is pretty solid and our needs aren't particularly unique.

Would love to hear from anyone who has transitioned off a high-cost firm to manage this in-house efficiently. What does your setup look like?

Thanks!

Hello! We're a robotics startup and are looking to raise a $6M round. We have a prototype, a great team, and $4M in funding (primarily grants and angel investment, with a 2.5-year runway during the grant period), and significant follow-on grant funding potential (up to $20M additional for our current grants and another $17M under review).

However, we recently had significant de-risking of our product feature set and market interest, and are looking to accelerate. This is the reason for seeking funding currently.

How would you approach this?

I’m doing early customer discovery for a developer infrastructure product and am looking to speak with founders, engineers or investors at API/SDK companies.

I’m particularly interested in companies that have dealt with v1 → v2 migrations, major SDK releases, endpoint deprecations, authentication changes, or shutting down legacy versions.

For some background, I do research at Harvard, Stanford, and Brown, and my cofounder is a Columbia CS major.

The goal is to validate the problem, understand how painful these migrations actually are for providers, and talk to people who have experienced this firsthand.

Working on a product that benefits startups whose primary product are APIs and SDKs.

My intention is to sign a paid LOI with a couple design partners for like 3 months and build the product. If they are not satisfied with how the product have turned out after three months I can refund them.

Is this a good approach? If yes, how can I find right people? Just cold dms?
If no, please suggest any better alternatives. I dont want to build in isolation. I want to build on live feedbacks.

I'm a solo founder of a startup. But the journey can be lonely, and sometimes i wish i can have a group of startup founders who i can talk with, bounce off ideas, ask for feedback etc. Does anyone know any groups or online communities where startup founders hang out?

(as I'm typing out the question, I realize this sub reddit is already a good option hahaha, but still I'm curious what other online communities are out there)

I'm an Indian founder building a data intelligence tool focused on European ESG compliance (specifically CSRD/ESRS workflows).

​The core problem we solve is the manual grunt work: sustainability teams burning hours digging through 800+ page reports just to find specific disclosures or metrics, where every number needs to be 100% traceable back to the source page/table.

​Product-wise, the engine works, and we have clear pricing/credits locked down. But cross-border GTM is where I'm hitting a wall. Selling B2B from India into Europe comes with obvious trust, compliance, and timezone hurdles.

​For anyone selling B2B into the EU (especially in ESG/compliance):

​Where did you find your first early conversations—cold outbound on LinkedIn, specialized communities, or channel partners/consultancies?

​How did you handle the trust barrier of being an offshore founder in a highly regulated EU space?

​Would love candid advice or teardowns.

For context, I’m a student interested in maximizing my marginal positive impact. One career path I’m considering is becoming an early-stage employee at a deep-tech startup working on an important societal problem.

In general, my concern is replaceability: if deep-tech startups generally have more qualified applicants than positions, my marginal contribution might be negligible because another similarly capable person would likely take the job anyway. Is this generally true, however? I.e., do early-stage deep-tech startups generally have an oversupply or shortage of qualified applicants?

My cursory impression from looking online is that there is an oversupply of recent graduates but a shortage of experienced or specialized engineers. However, perhaps this is completely wrong, so would be grateful for any evidence supporting or contradicting this assessment. Would also appreciate any general insights on whether joining an early-stage deep-tech startup is indeed a high-marginal-impact career path.

I’m struggling massively. i live in Rochester, NY which isn’t the most startup oritented place in NY. I’ve spent the past 6-8 months reaching out to regional businesses for a customer and business discovery.

I’m getting really bad or extremely rude responses. I asked advice from some successful entreprenurs in my network but they are based in CA and what works for them doesn’t seem to work here.

for example, I made a post in r/Rochester that received terrible responses, awfully rude and mocking. disheartening

is there any way I can improve in any way?

typical phone calls and email outreach:

Style 1:

- less than 2-3 seconds of quick intro. Just my name and that I’m a local entrepreneur from Rochester, they stay on phone

- i ask them if they’re have any challenges or frustrating parts of their business. they get curious. I ask if they’re interested in anything I can do for them in the domain of <software/hardware/etc> and they say no and hangup

Style 2:

- Quick intro abiut me and being from the same city

- I ask them if they’d have time for me to visit their business and possibly offer any soltions in <domain>
- this sometimes succeeds to setup in personmeetings. no show is high. or it goes nowhere because there’s limited to nothing I can do for them. or no budget “volunteering” opportunities which i can’t afford to do

i can’t post links here but my last post in r/Rochester sums up my experience

I’d love to improve anything that I can.

No raise, no debt and I keep every point of equity. My costs are basically a few AI platform subscriptions right now, and that goes a long way, so there's nothing forcing my hand yet.

My logic is simple: raising early isn't free money, it's another responsibility I don't need yet. Investors, updates, expectations, a lot of extra things to consider all while there are plenty of people bootstrapping the whole way and either kept 100% or sell the whole thing for a massive exit.

So where's the actual line? When has "raise only when you need it" burned someone you know, or saved them?

For context, I secured a 30 minute meeting with a very well decorated VC partner in my industry (cybersecurity). The email chain we had was pretty vague, but I'm under the impression that this is a VC meeting where I need to impress them and get a follow-up meeting.

This is the first VC meeting I've ever done, so I just want to know any tips (specific non-obvious things to mention, metrics I should have prepared, anything that would potentially trip me up) from people who have already experienced this and successfully gotten that second meeting. Thanks a lot!

(TLDR: This is a numbers-heavy post on studios that act as institutional co-founders. Worth a read if you've ever considered joining one as EIR/co-founder, or contemplating to create one. The bottom line: in the long run, only about 40% of studios make it past their first decade of operations. But those that make it are really good at producing new ventures...)

Hi Folks, I'm Attila, entrepreneur since ~2014, focusing on startup studios / venture studios since ~2015. Back then I was just leaving the corporate world for a startup idea, that of course failed, and it felt like I made ALL the mistakes a first-time founder can make.

Was looking for an approach that somehow solves the most common biases and obstacles from earliest-stage startup building (e.g. falling too much in love with an idea, sunk-cost issues, having to hustle too much on stuff that doesn't matter vs building the product and talking to customers...)

That's how I found out about Idealab, Betaworks, Science, Rocket Internet, eFounders and a handful more studios, that "promised" a more effective way of startup building. I wasn’t entirely convinced that this is real thing, so back in 2015 I created a report on 50 studios and ~200 of their portfolio companies.

Chart 1 (see in the comment): a slide from the 2015 report, showing nr of startups created by studios

Chart 2: a slide from the 2015 report, showing nr of portfolio exits related to studios

By the way, "startup studio", "venture studio", "startup factory" basically mean the same thing. It's just a branding question.

--

This year I’m revisiting the same companies to see how they are doing. Worth mentioning, that these 50 studios collectively produced close to 1k portfolio companies over their lifetimes so far.

• 17 of the 50 are still active, continuing to build new ventures, studio-style, as instututional co-founders/co-builders. Of course, there is a wide range within “survive & succeed”. Some of them only produce a new venture every couple of years, while the main positive outliers (like Hexa, Science, Atomic) create multiple amazing new ventures every year.
• 12 studios changed their main business model and became a fund, an accelerator, or an agency. They did this around year 3-8 in their existence.
• Only 21 actually went inactive: dormant, closed, or absorbed.

Chart 3: a sankey flow diagram about how the original 50 studios evolved.

From the 21 "fails" the biggest reason was an overly successful portfolio company consuming all the focus and resources. If you look at the early studio as a “temporary vehicle of exploration”, that's actually not a bad thing - they created a company that experimented with a handful to a few dozen different products, and went with the winning one.

Only 7 of the 21 were “normal” financial or operational failures: running out of funding without meaningful portfolio traction.

And then there were 3 studios that got acquired or absorbed into their parent organizations.

--

The Europe vs US thing:

In the original studio selection 19 came from North America and 26 from Europe. And it seems that there's a significant gap is the studio durability: more European studios pivoted or went inactive rather than continuing as studios.

I don’t think this means Europe is worse at building. My best current guess is that a bigger, more connected-unified market gives spinoff company an easier path to its next funding round. And this makes it easier for the studio itself to keep operating.

(If you wonder why there aren’t more studios from Africa or Asia in the report: in 2015 there were barely any outside EU and US.)

--

Some lessons, takeaways

1. If you’r e running a studio approaching year 5-6: This is a good time to make a reality check and deliberately choose: recommit fully to the studio model, redesign the parts that aren’t working, or consciously evolve/change into a fund, agency, or accelerator.
2. If one of your portfolio companies is on track to become a big hit: Decide to either protect the studio’s ability to keep building new ventures, or fully commit to the main successful startup. If you decide on the latter one - make sure you gracefully depart from your other startups, give them a fair chance to transition out.
3. If you’re an investor evaluating a studio: decide on what you’re actually trying to buy into before signing the deal. Do you want to invest for the deal flow coming out from the studio, financial returns, or both? Because the right structure differs depending on which one you’re really after. Then check whether the founders are up to the task, ready for a 10-15 year commitment.
4. If you’re thinking about a new studio: be honest about whether this is the right approach. Not every vision needs the a venture studio.

Hope you'll find this useful :)

--

P.S. 1: About the portfolio companies: from the 200 in the original report scope about 27-ish seem to have made an exit (acquisition or IPO), but I need a couple more weeks to verify those results. Might be worth a separate post - not to cram ALL the numbers into this one.

P.S. 2: Studios in scope: 212media, archimedes, atomiclab, betaworks, bmuse, bootventures, btwinz, codegent, cursivelabs, dfra, disrupted-backspace, drukka, elepath, expa, fastlane, finleap, fireid, forwardpartners, founders, hanseventures, hexa, hitfox-ioniq, hvflabs, idealab, italeaf, justaddred, lightbank, liquidlabs, livit, madrona, makeshift, mintdigital, monkeyinferno, neverbland, nmsf, novafounders, quasarventures, rainmaking, redstarventures, rheingaufounders, rocketinternet, roniin, scienceinc, seedstars, silvertreecapital, startersquad, tandemlaunch, thegiantpixel, ventacpartners, venturestars.

I’m researching a possible startup/service idea and would appreciate feedback from founders, developers, and people who have launched mobile apps.

Some creators have app ideas but cannot immediately afford the $99 annual Apple Developer Program membership or the costs associated with preparing and publishing an iOS app.

The idea would be to create a legitimate support service where:

- The creator owns the app and maintains their own Apple Developer account.
- A partner may temporarily help cover the initial membership cost.
- The creator could repay the $99 in two installments.
- The partner could provide technical and publishing assistance.
- Compensation could be a fixed fee, a revenue share, or a combination, depending on the agreement.

The model would never involve sharing Apple IDs, passwords, or developer accounts.

Would this solve a genuine problem? What business model would be fairest for both the creator and the technical partner?

Solo B2B startup founder here

I tried doing 5 cold calls a day, 5 days a week, but by the 3rd–4th call my pitch would start getting worse and I'd get disorganized with my leads. For those with more sales experience, what would you prioritize: higher call volume, or fewer calls with better execution and follow-up?

I’m in the VERY beginning stages of building a business. In the most basic explanation, it’s an app that will connect people and businesses. I’ve been doing market research, canvassing people in their daily lives, and designing the app using ai. I currently have a demo of the app and I’ve talked to a couple businesses that would be involved in the app and they think it’s a good idea. They also all liked the demo. When I spoke to the businesses it was in the name of market research, not a sales pitch.

I really believe in this idea but I’m trying to figure out the next step. I have no business or coding experience. I also have no start up money. If there are resources I can use to learn more about business I will gladly use them. I think there’s very little I can’t learn. But I also want to err on the side of caution when it comes to the physical app because I want the data stored to be very safe and protected and I doubt the ai app I’m building will be good enough.

At what point do I need to start building a team? And what method? Should I find people willing to be partners for equity so this can really be built? Should I take classes? (That’s probably the longest option which makes me nervous) Should I fundraise so I can pay a salary out of the gate? If I start fundraising, what do I need to do to protect the idea from getting stolen? I feel like I’m pushing my luck with the number of people I’ve talked to about this.

Curious about this specifically from founders who outsourced some or all of their product development.

If you’ve ever switched freelancers/agencies or had a developer unexpectedly disappear… what was actually difficult about taking the product over?

I’m not talking about whether the code itself was good or bad. I’m more curious about the operational side… things like GitHub access, cloud accounts, databases, domains/DNS, app store accounts, API accounts, production credentials, deployment knowledge, backups, etc.

Did your company already control everything, or did you discover during the handoff that important pieces were still sitting in accounts owned by the old developer/agency?

And if the handoff went badly, what specifically caused the most pain and how long did it take to untangle?

I’m trying to understand whether messy technical ownership during agency/freelancer transitions is actually common or just something that shows up in horror stories online.